When I was fourteen, my parents bought me a new wardrobe. I chose one without a mirror. I couldn’t run the risk of catching an unplanned glimpse of myself any more, not even in daylight.
5. Liz Frost, Young Women and the Body: A Feminist Sociology (Palgrave, Basingstoke and NY, 2001)
6. Ian M. Goodyer (ed.), The Depressed Child and Adolescent (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995, 2001)
Habits
52. I sometimes feel something inside me which makes me do things that are really senseless and that I do not want to do.
The Padua Inventory
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CANINE ACRAL LICK. A compulsive paw-licking disorder seen in dogs that is thought to resemble OCD in humans. Fred Penzel, Obsessive–Compulsive Disorders
As I entered my fourth year at the girls’ school, I was fourteen, spending most of my time in a room with no mirror, and a firmly shut door. It was during that school year that I painted the Frankie Goes to Hollywood mural on the wall next to my bed. It was in colour in acrylics, on anaglypta backing paper, and showed the band in profile, in full ‘Two Tribes’ Soviet military regalia, crouching behind an impressive array of weaponry. Just in case anybody had missed the message, I had added the following on the top left-hand corner, in big red capitals: ‘ALL UNAUTHORISED ENTRANTS WILL BE SHOT.’
The shelf of Enid Blyton books which had been on that wall was long gone, and it was a different girl who slept in that bed. The few photos I have from that time – for there were few which I allowed to be taken of me – make me wince. In my least favourite one I’m sitting at my brother’s bar mitzvah in a baggy-topped mint-coloured dress, white pumps, white tights, a Human League haircut and a face like a slapped arse.
My mother told me that she saw Frankie Goes to Hollywood as bodyguards, there to protect me as I slept. Maybe I thought that they might repel any grinning intruders in burglars’ hats. Certainly I was scared and angry most of the time, and I thought that I might die soon. My teeth were causing trouble again, and this time I was going to have to go into surgery.
My adult eye teeth had still not come through, so the dentist took an X-ray. He showed us the plate: there were my baby eye teeth still in place, one with its root almost gone, and sitting above them, at a ninety-degree angle, were their impacted adult counterparts. There were various options, he said, but the only one that was sure to work was surgery, a proper operation under general anaesthetic. The surgeon would pull out my baby eye teeth and ‘expose’ the adult ones, then I could be turned over to an orthodontist who would find a way to drag them forward and down into the right position. I’d never quite lost my fear of falling asleep in the natural way, so the prospect of a general anaesthetic was beyond horrifying. I begged my mother and the dentist to consider the less drastic options, but he was adamant, and my mother convinced. It wasn’t up to me. And so I prepared to die – perhaps.
The tooth people were going to need more detailed pictures of my retarded dentition. My mother took me to the X-ray department at Edgware General Hospital. She had worked there as a medical social worker for most of my childhood, so I had been used to thinking of it as a friendly place, where my brother and I got to roll toy cars down ramps and pretend to buy paper clips and blotting paper from the secretaries. As we walked along the long corridors, women in crisp uniforms smiled at us and came out with amiable grown-up inanities like ‘Hello, Ruth! Is this one yours?’ I had visited my mother there after her mastectomy and still not seen the truth. But now I understood: a hospital was a place of pain.
We were called into a big room full of nasty-looking machines. The radiographer explained that I would need two different X-rays taken. The first one would be a 360-degree view of my jaw. I had to place my chin in a kind of scold’s bridle, and stand still and slightly bow-legged for a minute while an X-ray camera whirred round my head on a circular track. Then I was ushered into a side room where I stood up straight with my head in a vice while the radiographer hid behind a door and took first a shot of the left side, then the right. After a short wait the pictures were ready to see. The all-round ones were especially monstrous with their eye sockets, ghostly wisps of hair and elongated rows of bared teeth. I didn’t appreciate the preview of myself as a cadaver.
The orthodontist lived and worked in a tall, ramshackle house near the confluence of the Hendon Way and the Finchley Road, along with his collection of ballet photos, his vast library of classical records and several cats. He had Radio 3 on as he worked and would comment on the music, whether it was a good recording, whether you could hear the wobble in that soprano’s voice which was always perceptible when she hit top C: ‘Here it comes . . . now, can you?’ I would reply, I hoped, as intelligently as anyone could with a mouth full of someone else’s fingers.
He needed to take an impression on that first appointment.
‘Will it hurt?’ I asked.
‘Nothing we do here hurts,’ he said, as if he’d worn the words out long since.
I watched him as he filled a couple of jaw-shaped impression trays with blue putty. He told me to open wide and then stuck them over my teeth, one set at a time. I thought I would choke while he held the trays in and when he pulled them out it felt for a moment as if he were taking a set of teeth with them. They can’t have made a very good impression, because at my second appointment he told my mother that I would have to have a molar removed from each side of my upper set – to make room, he said.
The dentist who removed the molar was kind. She numbed me nicely, and then positioned herself in such a way that all I could see was her face and the back of her hand. Mum could see the enormous pliers she used and told me afterwards what a good thing it was that I couldn’t. I don’t remember any pain at the time of extraction, but I do remember the pressure and the most tremendous noise filling my head, like a boulder being dragged slowly over another boulder. It hurt later of course. And so did the sight of my smile in the mirror, more than ever. And then a few girls at school, sensing a weak point, would say things about my lack of teeth.
By the summer of 1985 my jaw and I were ready for surgery. I was taken to meet the surgeon in his consulting room; it had wooden furniture of crushing heaviness, and overwhelming upholstery. A dental chair sat in the middle of it all, like an instrument in its case. Everything was going to be fine, apparently. Of course it was: he’d taken out the Queen’s own wisdoms and she was all right. He shook my father’s hand and said he’d see me in a few weeks. On the train home from Harley Street I saw a beautiful man sitting opposite me – an improved Rupert Everett, I told a friend later – and thought about how ugly I was going to be soon, assuming I was still alive, of course.
The surgery took place in the early evening in a small private hospital just round the corner from the consulting room of Mr Queen’s Wisdoms. The anaesthetist came up to my room to give me the pre-med, which made me feel so woozily awful that I wanted to be knocked out. A couple of orderlies lifted me onto a trolley and took me downstairs. I noticed – again – that one of them was very attractive, and wondered why there were so many handsome men in the world just when I was about to be definitively uglified. The general anaesthetic knocked me out so thoroughly that when I came round, I asked when the operation was going to be. In retrospect it was terrifying, a perfect hole in time.
After my parents had gone home and the pre-med had worn off, I was left to sleep. It was impossible though – I had never felt more awake in my life. Outside the window, Harley Street was dark and quiet. No nurses came during the night to ask me if I wanted anything, or to tell me to get back into bed, and I didn’t summon any either. I had The Tin Drum with me – typical reading for me at the time – which I had half finished, and which would remain for ever unread beyond the place where I had given up. This was marked by a postcard depicting the clinic, one of the windows circled with an arrow pointing to it: I was in here. I paced up and down the room, every now and then stopping by the mirror. In the half-light my eyes were bright
, and my slightly swollen lips a reddish-purple. I thought that perhaps I could look quite attractive and interesting, provided I didn’t attempt to smile ever again.
Now that the dentist and surgeon had made plenty of room in my mouth, it was time for the orthodontist to fill it up with his machinery. First, there were retainers. These were sheets of plastic moulded to my palate, with wires at the front that fitted round my teeth. I wore them at night, and each time they were tightened they hurt like fury for several days. After the retainer had done its work, I had thin wire braces carefully and discreetly cemented to the teeth. These worked with elastic bands. For a while I went around with one end of an elastic band attached to a hook cemented to the more impacted eye tooth, while the other was attached to a wire. Every few weeks he would twist the wire round another notch. My cousins and brother had the same orthodontist and also had their mouths furnished with his interesting contraptions. Saturday lunches at my grandparents’ were punctuated by the sound of yelps as another elastic band went pinging into someone’s chicken soup.
Whatever the reasoning behind his methods, they were slow. Even as an undergraduate, I still had the odd wire, clear or metallic, cemented to some part of my upper set. They weren’t very obvious to anyone else, but were hideous to me. In the end, a new dentist looked at my mouth, was horrified, and instructed me to tell my orthodontist that I was getting married – whether I was or not – and all the material in my mouth would have to go. He exchanged the wire for yet another retainer. I wore it for a while but then I stopped going. My wisdoms have given me no trouble, unusually for a member of my family, but I still have the gaps.
If I seem to be going into too much detail about my teeth, forgive me. For a long time, they were one of my favourite excuses for not bothering with boys and for boys not seeming to bother with me; for staying in my room with my music and my ruminations and my books. I spent a whole year before the operation waiting to see if I might die, and then five years after the operation with a mouth full of intermediate technology and a camouflaged smile. I blamed the fear beforehand, the horror of what was being visited on my body, and my frustration and anger at having no say in what I began to do to myself during that long, shadowy pre-operation year. The stressed-out animal in me began, mutely, to make its presence felt.
It’s the first attempt to cover up the damage that sticks in my mind. I was, for one production only, a member of an amateur dramatic society, and I had a part in the chorus of the society’s own musical version of The Prince and the Pauper. I was being fitted for my guttersnipe costume, a sort of crude grey sack with short sleeves and a deep neckline. ‘Not to worry about my arms,’ I said to the wardrobe lady, who almost certainly hadn’t noticed them. ‘It’s just the cat scratching.’
My arms were the first bits of me I ever picked, and I’ve never stopped picking them. Along with my shoulders, they are the first places I go to when I get the urge. At any time, sitting at my computer, or on the sofa, or anywhere else reasonably private, my hand might absently push my sleeve up; then I will rub up and down my upper arm, scanning for any rough bits, any bumps, any scabs or bits of dry skin. If I get a hit, I will grab hold of the flesh and muscle of the affected area and twist it round so that I can have a really good look at it; sometimes I have to screw my head and neck round to get the best possible view. Once I’ve got a secure enough purchase with my three smaller fingers, I’ll pinch the bump between my forefinger and thumb, squeezing out the contents – sebum, keratin, blood, pus, whatever; to me it’s usually just ‘white stuff’ – I have to ‘get the white stuff out’. Now I’ll have the taste for it, and I’ll peer harder, feel around the adjacent area for more spots to pick, more blemishes to burst, then spread my search over the rest of the arm. Then, if I still feel unsatisfied and can’t pull myself out of it, to the other arm, then the shoulders, my trunk, my breasts. If I’m still not through when I’ve covered the top half of my body, I’ll start on my legs. If my legs are bare, they’re an alternative starting point. Other times I’ll find a mirror and have a go at my face instead.
I’ve been told many times by many people that it doesn’t look as bad as I think, but I can see the difference: the general dryness, the scar tissue, the areas of flat hypo- or hyper-pigmentation, so extensive that if I look at myself in the mirror in a certain light, I can see a kind of tidemark running along the tops of my breasts and up to my arms, its boundary marking the area round my collarbone which is impossible to see without a mirror, and where I could never get a purchase.
Now that I’m old enough to be their mother, I look at teenage girls in their pearly skins – so fresh somehow even through spots – and think, ‘Aw, aren’t they lovely.’ I suppose I must have been lovely in at least that statutory minimum way too, although I didn’t feel it. There weren’t too many scars in those days, only my BCG where I’d picked and picked, my tree-climbing wounds, and the collection of raised right bumps halfway up my ribs on the right where I’d had a patch of shingles as a four-year-old. There was also the blue stain underneath my bottom lip, at the right-hand corner. I thought – and my mother thought – that it was a birthmark, until one winter in my early thirties, where I noticed a fluid-filled swelling on that side of the mouth – the same side where a few days earlier my cousin’s baby had stuck her finger in and pulled. I panicked – cancer! – but after consultations with one doctor and two dentists I was told, definitively, that the swelling and the blue stain were both parts of the same ‘mucocel’, a damaged salivary duct caused when, at some point, I’d bitten my cheek that bit too hard. I think I’ve been biting my cheeks for as long as I’ve had teeth – it’s an automatic response to any strong emotion. Sometimes there are other blue marks on my face, but only where I’ve been rubbing it, absent-mindedly, with an ink-covered hand.
Over the years, I’ve acquired a certain amount of scar tissue, and my skin in the most frequently picked areas is especially dry, but these effects came on gradually. Usually my injuries were of the most minor, superficial kind, and usually these healed easily and quickly. But sometimes I would make a bigger cut, one which somehow I could not allow to heal. There is a crater-shaped scar above my left eyebrow, which I made the summer I was seventeen; that was the summer my great-aunt Ann told me that I was a pretty girl, that I had ‘classic features’, but I insisted that I could not possibly be described that way – not when I was Marked, when I had Marks on me. That was also the summer when I had a volunteer job in the office of an organization which campaigned for the rights of Soviet Jews. One of the older women there asked me what had happened to my forehead. I said I didn’t remember. ‘What?!’ she said. ‘You smashed your face, and you don’t remember how?’ There is also a flat, white, strawberry-shaped scar a couple of inches above my right knee. At one point, I remember my mother crying out in dismay: ‘There’s a hole in your leg. How on earth did you manage to do that?’
The worst of my picking scars is the hardened purple lump on the back of my right thigh. At some point in my twenty-second year I managed to pick at a spot – real or imaginary – to the point where I made a huge scab. Rather than leaving it to heal I couldn’t stop myself from picking it open again and again. It didn’t matter what I tried to do with plasters or cream or even bandages: it was there and it was tempting me to pick it. It didn’t help that because of the position of the scab I would often slice it off when I sat on one of the high chairs in the library where I worked, and only find out when I went to the toilet and found the back of my thigh striped with blood. It took months to heal. The scar has shrunk and lightened but never disappeared. It’s a reminder of a worse, sicker time. But it hasn’t ever, as I feared, led to skin cancer. Yet.
From the very start, I was disgusted with my skin habit – ‘You were picking, weren’t you!’ – and ashamed in general of the way that I seemed to be wasting my life, pacing round and round my room, listening to the same records again and again, picking and ruminating. My teenage diaries were full of resolution
s to stop. I was aware that the picking gratified me in some way and this seemed worse than just little-girl disgusting; it had to be sexually perverse. It didn’t hurt while I was doing it, and often I seemed to be in a kind of trance, lost in reverie while my hands continued automatically to search and pick, search and pick. While I did so I would sometimes be distantly aware of a desire to get rid of irritating anomalies, to get what the cosmetic adverts call the ‘impurities’ out of my skin, so that it could be smooth and even, as it was supposed to be. It’s simple housekeeping: if I can just take care of these unsightly bumps, I think, then my skin will be perfect – I’ll have tidied up. But skin is a living thing, and you can no more tidy up once and be done with it than you can wipe your worktops clean for ever.
Sometimes I would find enough resolution to wrench myself out of a picking session; sometimes I would simply run out of places to pick and slowly come to, sore, smarting, and ashamed. Now and then I would attempt to make repairs. I would wash the area I had just ravaged with water and cotton wool, and then lather on the antiseptic cream. Once or twice I tried to put a bandage on the whole upper arm, partly to heal it and partly to stop me getting to it again. It never worked. I bought a pair of lacy Madonna ‘Like a Virgin’ gloves to wear when I was alone as a preventative measure, but I pulled them off and picked away all the same. Before long they were balled up at the back of my desk drawer along with the hair ribbons I’d never worn but couldn’t bring myself to throw away.
Woman Who Thought too Much, The Page 6